Case Study: Occupational Health And Safety

Introduction

(OHS) Occupational Health and Safety is a standard based guidelines which set out the responsibilities of the company and employees to ensure that safety in the workplace must be maintained. Despite the policies and hospital procedures, there are reported cases of sickness absences and leaving jobs. Generally back injuries are one of the biggest concerns, because it is the leading cause of disability among nurses in the health industry. This can be associated with dynamic working conditions such as lifting, manual handling of patients, standing for long hours and improper use of body mechanics. This paper examines the other activities that contribute to the development back pain, and to explore the effectiveness of multi-disciplinary interventions that includes physical training, ergonomics and cognitive behavioural training and finally, to suggest ways for improving health and safety in the

(2013) outlined that, there are several causes musculoskeletal injuries and it is more common in women than in men and it is usually from physical workloads, frequent manual handling of patients and inappropriate use of body mechanics that can lead to further injury. Shawashi et al. (2013) stated that, majority of the respondents of 64.6% who experienced back pain were female and reported pain after commencing nursing procedures such as lifting, repositioning and transferring patients. Besides, back pain is a serious issue, not exclusive to a country or hospital department, but, affecting nurses all around the world, mostly in developing countries such as Philippines, which has reported high prevalence rate of 80% closely followed by 77% in Turkey, Ethiopia by 67.5% and Iran 50%. On the contrary, De Castro et al. (2009) expressed that, even in developed country such as United States, the prevalence of back pain was about 20-52% due to the nature of the job and other unclear factors such as obesity, smoking, stress and pre-existing health